LCD clock

After my half-year trip to South Korea, where I worked at Samsung Electronics as Senior Engineer, I have returned to Russia to follow other pursuits...
And so I decided to "resurrect" my electronics skills and make money on it. But it had to do much training first. So this was my first electronics projects after the Korea.

It's just an ordinary clock with an alarm which use LCD display and PIC microcontroller. But still I have tried my "new" laser-iron technology of PCB production at home - see below.






The Clock device uses PIC16F648 MCU and DS1307 Real-time clock IC. Here is the chematics:



Simple enough. The PCB and the assembly:



A disadvantage of the firmware is that it doesn't use sleep mode and other power-saving features, so the clock don't work too long using the batteries.

Some words on "laser-iron" tech I mentioned before.

It's very fast, accurate and simple method of making PCBs at home.
In short: you use an ordinary iron to transfer PCB layout from paper to foiled glass-cloth laminate. First, you need to find kind of paper which is sutable for this - the most complex part. I choosed color laser printer paper which was sold at nearest office-parts shop. Then, you print the PCB on this paper with maximum quality (using highest resolution and most of printer toner per pixel). Then, using the iron, you "print" the picture of PCB to the laminate and you get an accurate representation and then etch using ordinary FeCl3 or whatever. The method is very simple, but there are many catches. So if you are interested, please write me a letter using contact info on the main page and I will explain it in details.